Follow The Leader / Pro Wrestling

aka: Professional Wrestling

• Lou Thesz is credited with innovating several wrestling moves that would become common place, the German suplex being the most common, the powerbomb perhaps being the most popular, but the Thesz Press being the most obvious.
• In 1934, the Masked Marvel gimmick made its way to Mexico in then fledgling promotion EMLL. Mascara Maravilla was so popular more masked luchadors such as El Santo were promoted by Salvador Lutteroth. El Santo himself became so popular that the entire "Lucha Libre" subculture was pretty much kicked off by him.
• Las Edecánes/Reinas/Diosas de(l) EMLL/CMLL/Ring, a group of dancing women wearing very little clothing who inform fans of the falls and entertain them during commercial breaks. Not only have other wrestling promotions like WCW copied this long running CMLL group, but similar "sign girls" have been found in the ranks of other sport promotions like UFC (although that's not too far off). The concept originally comes from the ring girls in boxing, scantily clad women that hold up signs telling the crowd the number of the round about to start.
• The National Wrestling Alliance forming collaborative agreements between pro wrestling organizations all over the world lead to The International Wrestling Association in an effort to compete against what was basically a giant wrestling trust to any "outlaw" promotions not allowed to join^note the Puerto Rican and Japanese companies of the same name were unaffiliated with both. Later came the Independent Wrestling Association (starting with IWA Mid-South), The Allied Independent Wrestling Federations, Pro Wrestling International and The World Wrestling League, who while not as close to the NWA model, still owe their existence to the concept it started. The World Wrestling Network and Global Pro Wrestling Alliance are even further from the original mold but still pay respect to the NWA.
• While the term was already in use, Gorgeous George pretty much became the progenitor of The Gimmick in professional wrestling as we know it in 1950. Although, many of his more successful imitators, such as Buddy Rogers, weren't actually examples of the trope he named. Rogers himself was different enough to spawn his own "Nature Boy" archetype, Ric Flair being the most famous. Ironically, despite all this, George did not actually invent The Gimmick, he merely copied the look of another wrestler named Lord Patrick Lawnsende and took it up to eleven as an elegant, effeminate spectacle.
  • First there was "The Nature Boy" Buddy Rogers, wrestling legend and the codifier of many of the notable wrestler tropes. Then came "The Nature Boy" Ric Flair, cultural icon and 16 time world champion. Up third was "The Nature Boy" Buddy Landell, who doesn't even have his own page. There's yet to be a fourth Nature Boy.
• Pro wrestling in Japan had been restricted to sideshow acts for other events and dedicated clubs until Rikidozan decided to emulate the territorial promotions he had found in the USA with the JWA in 1953. A year later the promotions that would come to be known as "Joshi" sprung up in response to a WWWA tour, though only All Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling survived after the fad had died down. Fifty years later, the latter would come full circle with SHIMMER and Anarchy Championship Wrestling seeking to revive the USA women's scene by taking cues from joshi.
• The establishment of All Japan Pro Wrestling is where wrestling promoters not only resigned themselves to fans throwing streamers for the baby faces but actually encouraged such.
• In the late 1970s, when "Superstar" Billy Graham defeated the then-perennially popular Bruno Sammartino for the WWF Championship and held onto the title for the better part of a year. While Graham remained a heel during his first title run and wasn't necessarily cheered by the audience, he was a lot more charismatic and amusing than most of WWE's faces at the time, proving that wrestling heels could do a lot more than just anger the crowd and make the faces look good. Not only did Graham eventually turn face, but his costume and gimmick were more or less copied by Jesse Ventura, Hulk Hogan, Scott Steiner and other famous wrestlers, and his Lovable Rogue persona was a profound influence on Eddie Guerrero - whom Graham personally admired - and others.
• On the rare occasions that someone creates a new gimmick match that isn't laughed out of the building on first sight expect every wrestling promotion from backyard to baseball stadium to come up with their own variation, or just rip it off outright. There's been enough bootleg Royal Rumbles that it probably deserves its own entry on the Shoddy Knockoff Product page, people are still doing War Games (including WWE) over 20 years after the company that created it went under, and it's basically a sure thing that any show in North America will feature at least one person falling off a ladder.
• Since Shawn Michaels became the massive legend that he is after breaking off from his partner Marty Jannetty, it seems the main purpose of a tag team sometimes is to find out which member will become a mega star and which one, well... won't. WWE alone has tried this so many times to varying results in the years since the Rockers that two or three people would be necessary for enough hands and fingers to count them all.^note This isn't only Follow the Leader. The WWF had done this before, Shawn and Marty were just the first really memorable one. Vince hates tag team wrestling because he doesn't think it draws money (despite plenty of evidence to the contrary), so pretty much any tag team that doesn't consist of blood relatives is gonna have a pretty short shelf life, though there are exceptions
• Michaels' post-Rockers persona went to inspire the quintessential American indy wrestler look: a cocky heartbreaker with at least a decently technical wrestling style, often with high-flying moves. It had its heyday in the glory days of Ring of Honor and fell out of favor a bit since, in many cases because it devolved into Spot Monkey territory or examples that over time felt generic enough to resemble parodies, but it never really died out.
• The Universal Wrestling Association and Lucha Libre Internacional in Mexico starting a trios division lead to CMLL starting one of its own, while WCCW also followed suit in the USA with its "World Six Man Tag Team Titles". The NWA, which had already tried and scrapped the idea were even willing to try again after Los Tres Fantasticos took off.
• Starrcade was a show made for the pro wrestling fans who spent the most money, namely those in the Carolinas and, to a lesser extent, Georgia. The 1986 million dollar gate was unprecedented for a pro wrestling event in North America, but JCP's upper management didn't fully appreciate what they had and ended up tweaking the show to be more like WrestleMania, hoping to displace it as the USA's premier pay per view. This not only angered fans who would have otherwise kept spending money to attend the show and cost more to produce but also failed to make a mark in the pay per view market due to Vince McMahon successfully intimidating most networks into not running Starrcade.
• The "anything goes" style of Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling, trope namer for Garbage Wrestler, spawned many imitators. Although this was exactly what FMW wanted to happen, W*ING and IWA Japan were even acknowledged as rivals, openly. The latter was amusing because IWA was a breakaway from WWC, which was one of FMW's biggest influences, proving this trope is very cyclic. Still, while W*ING tried for a measure of originality, IWA Japan's "King Of The Deathmatch" was viewed as an obvious imitation of both W*ING and FMW. Even in Mexico, where "extremos" where traditionally shunned, there were many FMW type enterprises, including an XMW!
• After the arrival of Hulk Hogan, from 1994-1996, WCW revamped themselves into "WWF Lite", until the arrival of Kevin Nash and Scott Hall. And the rest is history... Before that, WCW head booker Jim Herd decided to try and mimic the WWF's success with the "Rock 'n Wrestling Connection" by tying WCW to another aspect of pop culture — namely, movies. Fortunately, he dropped that idea after the first shots, a wrestler based on The Wizard of Oz (played by Nash in his pre-Diesel days) and a Pay-Per-View appearance by RoboCop^note Not only did RoboCop make an appearance, the PPV was called "Capitol Combat '90: Return of RoboCop", failed miserably, but it wasn't Herd's first bad idea, and definitely not his last. Ironically, the WWF actually had much more success with this concept, as several of their most successful gimmicks prior to the Attitude Era were based on movies. Most noteable was Scott Hall's Razor Ramon character, who was based on Tony Montana
• Like FMW before it, the success of ECW led to the founding of a number of other "hardcore" and "deathmatch" wrestling federations(IWA M-S, XPW, 3PW, CZW), and no less an organization than the WWF followed their lead. WCW tried to foster a backlash to this, painting themselves as a "family-friendly" wrestling show, but they soon jumped on the bandwagon after that posture failed. After all, how "family-friendly" can a show about people beating the snot out of each other be?^note Jim Cornette has mentioned that shortly after Turner purchased the Crockett territory and turned it into WCW they got a memo saying they couldn't have "gratuitous violence", which had him (and the rest of the booking team) asking "How can we not have gratuitous violence on a show that's about gratuitous violence?"
• Ring Warriors was the first promotion to stream shows online, and though it did not find success in its target market(USA) for about fifteen years, it beat the larger USA national promotions in Africa and Europe because of its ease of availability. Ice Ribbon's 19'Oclock was perhaps the first internet streaming show to find success in its actual target market, as well as overseas.
• After Genichiro Tenryu introduced a Junior Heavyweight Tag Team division in WAR, New Japan, WCW and Pro Wrestling NOAH were all quick to duplicate it.
• Naturally with the success of the New World Order every fed in the universe even your local mom and pop indy needed to have a stable trying to take over the company. One of the nWo's first imitations, D-Generation X, was also one that was the least like it. Let that sink in. Every fed including the mom and pop indy also needs to do an evil scheming authority figure whose sole reason for existing seems to be making life miserable for the babyface du jour. Naturally said babyface is almost always a badass '90s Anti-Hero.
• Similar to the case of Billy Graham, the Attitude Era of the late 90s the likes of The Rock and Stone Cold popularised the anti-hero in wrestling so that for a good while it wasn't just faces vs heels, it was more like heels that got booed vs heels that got cheered.
• Although shoot-style eventually faded into the sidelines, Universal Wrestling Federation (in particular Nobuhiko Takada) still codified the iconic Japanese wrestling archetype of "handsome wrestler in tights and leggers who kicks a lot", which came to be just everywhere in the Japanese wrestling scene of the 2000-2010s. Even if many examples have progressed into more developed appearances and wrestling styles since, the basic version remains popular and is still the default character for many indy juniors.
• Eric Bischoff noted that during the Monday Night Wars, when WCW started upping the numbers of Pay-Per-View events, the WWF would follow suit.
• It may be hard - even all but impossible - to believe now, but as late as 1995, the women of WWF were a lot more prim and proper than their male counterparts, especially when it came to the costumes they wore; when Miss Elizabeth, Randy "Macho Man" Savage's manager, whipped off her skirt at the inaugural SummerSlam in 1988, resulting in a (modest by current standards) Panty Shot, it was huge news. The WWF's attempt to revive their women's division started with putting the belt on respected wrestler Jacqueline but the success of Sunny and Sable, two hot blonde bombshells that were pure T&A, lead to them bringing in more women to feature in magazine spreads such as Debra, Ivory, Tori and Trish Stratus-simply lucking out that some of them were or would become respected wrestlers. Thus the WWE Divas were born.
• After WWE trademarked its female performers with the name 'Divas', other promotions started coming up with names for their women too. Ultimate Pro Wrestling had "Vixens", which WWE itself adopted for it's "ECW" brand where UPW "vixen" Ariel was a feature. TNA notably had the Knockouts, Ring of Honour toyed with a "Women of Honour" concept, nCw had their "Femme Fatales" etc.
• Chyna was presented as an anti-diva who competed with the men and won the Intercontinental title three times. Over the next few years there was a lot more emphasis on talent over looks in women's wrestling in wrestlers such as Lita, Molly Holly and Jazz being pushed to the top of the division. Trish Stratus as well who started out as eye candy but worked to improve her wrestling and did so to the point Vince was able to make her the face of the division for several years.
  • WCW's response to Chyna was to hire female bodybuilder Christi Wolff as a valet and call her Asya. Because Asya is bigger than Chyna, see.
• The Apocalypse Wrestling Federation began running shows focused on its women's division, "Girls Night Out" in 1999. This most obviously inspired regional rival Northern Championship Wrestling, but before nCw's Femme Fatales spinoff there was also AAA's Reina De Reinas(which has since become a title belt defended outside of the event). AAA technically did it first by two months too but didn't put women in the main event until after AWF put Sherri Martel at the top of the card. See also: All Pro Wrestling's Chick Fight(which split off on its own for a time) and IWA Mid-South's Volcano Girls(which was phased out for Queen Of The Death Matches).
• All Star Championship Wrestling, Com Pro Oklahoma and Steel Rage Pro Wrestling all brought out "X Divisions" after TNA got started in 2002.
• The whole Diva Search/making models into wrestlers initiative from WWE that followed said golden era for the Divas was actually a result of Trish's success at taking levels in badass.
• For two companies that have been direct rivals as long as All Japan Pro Wrestling and New Japan Pro-Wrestling, the two actually don't seem to pay too close attention to each other. For example, All Japan tried to start bringing in "mixed martial artists" and booking such bouts after New Japan did, even though the fiasco shamed Antonio Inoki out of the company. The end result was "Wrestle-1" breaking away from All Japan as it's own company. New Japan's acquisition and heavy push of Brock Lesnar also ignored that All Japan doing similar with Goldberg was mostly a failed experiment. The result was even worse for New Japan as Brock didn't only put even less effort into his matches than Bill, Lesnar then tried to hold the IWGP Heavyweight Title belt hostage (IGF bailed them out).
• TNA began creating PPV events centered around specific gimmick matches (eg. "Lockdown" a PPV that had all cage matches on the card) so WWE started releasing gimmick PPVs such as "Extreme Rules" (every match is a different gimmick match), "TLC: Tables, Ladders and Chairs" (featured a ladder match, table match, chair match and TLC match among others) and "Night of Champions" (every title is on the line). This arguably started years earlier with WCW and their annual Uncensored PPV. Like Extreme Rules, every match on the card had a gimmick. TNA cannot take credit for originality here, though it can still say WWE followed its lead for a change.
• In 2008, John Morrison and The Miz debuted an online talk show on WWE.com known as The Dirt Sheet. This program was instrumental in getting the tag team over and showcasing their personalities, and also generated quite a few hits on the site. Within weeks, other online shows started appearing from the likes of Cryme Tyme, Matt Striker, and Scotty Goldman. The only one that lasted longer than a couple weeks was Cryme Tyme's Word Up, which resulted in a feud between the two tag teams. In 2011, lightning struck again, as the success of Zack Ryder's YouTube series, Z! True Long Island Story, led to a number of other underutilized wrestlers starting their own YouTube accounts, including Ryder's former tag team partner, Curt Hawkins (which WWE quickly killed).
• In a very odd example, Juggalo Championship Wrestling (a promotion owned by two very weird guys) decided to book reality television "star" Angelina Pivarnick after she consistently generated the lowest rated segments of the TNA Impact episodes she appeared on.
• After the success of The Nexus, WWE attempted to duplicate that success with the rookies of NXT season 2. To say it didn't work out that time would be an enormous Understatement.
• WSU and SHIMMER were the primary all-women's promotions in North America in the late 2000s. Upon WSU's success with internet PPV - allowing them to do regular live shows streamed over the internet - other promotions followed suit, most obviously PWS spinoff BLOW, which ran with the main PWS card directly against the WSU/CZW double features. SHINE Wrestling was a spin-off of SHIMMER that ran monthly iPPVs, and others such as nCw Femme Fatales, WILD Wrestling, Bellatrix and Pro Wrestling: EVE popped up in The New '10s.
• Total Divas's success led to WWE producing more reality shows featuring its performers on the WWE Network - such as Legends House, Breaking Ground, WWE 24/7 and the revival of WWE Tough Enough.
• Since the late 2000s, WWE has become obsessed with creating female tag teams of Alpha Bitches that evoked Mean Girls. Although the earliest tag team of the archetype was on the independent circuit as The Minnesota Homewrecking Crew, the Mean Girls element came directly from Team Blondage, one of which got a WWF tryout and another a developmental deal. The Beautiful People in TNA beat any WWE examples to television and thus were the first mainstream examples, founded on two of Team Blondage's rivals no less. WWE introduced their version in LayCool. Since then, WWE has often had other female performers change their gimmicks to be more in line with the LayCool archetypes - prissy Alpha Bitches who mocked everyone else's looks and had quite a bit of Les Yay with each other. The Bella Twins (who did this twice), the Divas of Doom (Beth Phoenix and Natalya Neidhart), the Beautiful Fierce Females and eventually the Iconic Duo followed suit. Madison Rayne and Gail Kim's random pairing in TNA circa 2011 was also rather obviously inspired by the formula too.
• Ever since Maryse had her time in the spotlight, numerous other female wrestlers have used a Hair Flip as part of a taunt on the ring apron. Brooke Adams, Summer Rae^note Which even got a Twitter Lampshade Hanging by Maryse herself, Silvie Silver, Katey Harvey.
• Melina's signature taunt was to do the splits on the ring apron. Since then, many other female wrestlers have opted to do so. Annie Social, the Owens Twins, Daffney Unger, La Rosa Negra etc.
• The then new Campeonato Mundial Elite of LLE, which brought in wrestlers from Africa, The Caribbean and Americas for a tournament and the long running Best Of The Super Junior held by New Japan inspired WWE to combine both concepts into it's own Cruiser Weight Classic in 2016. This in turn lead New Japan to bring back the Super J Cup, which it hadn't held in about seven years, as if to tell the world they not only did the junior heavyweights the world over tournament first too but could still do it better.
• In 2016 as the TNA brand name was coming to an end and the company itself was closing ever closer to closure, one of the few things generating consistent positive buzz was its use of Matt Hardy, who was undergoing a Career Resurrection of sorts. Even when they decided to go back to the Cain and Abel well once again and have Matt feud with his brother Jeff, fans found the results very entertaining, especially after they climaxed in a falls count anywhere match in a backyard known as "The Final Deletion", which saw Matt actually beat Jeff, seemingly for good. Even WWE paid attention, enough to film their own final deletion type match between The New Day and The Wyatt Family. Unfortunately the WWE version fell flat, since not only was it an obvious imitation, but it was also only an imitation of one match in an otherwise completely different program.
• Ever since Konnan came into the World Wrestling League people have been accusing WWL of copying AAA and/or Lucha Underground, which is ironic considering Triple A was one of the first WWL members back when it acted less like a promotion and more like a governing body for several others. Such accusations became even more common later in 2017 when Tag Team partners White Shadow Mark Davidson and Brown Sugar Daddy Excellent Mantel had a dispute over Davidson's relationship with La Perla Negra Allison only for all three of them to wind up winning the Trios Title belts, the similarity to The Son of Havok, Angelico and Ivelisse Vélez's route to the Underground Trios belts being pretty obvious(and equally ironic since Velez being in WWL is part of what got her in AAA, and Lucha Underground by proxy). Also not helping is that Los Favoritos, as the Mark-Mantel-Allison trio were called, feuded with Legio, who would only be superficially similar to Lucha Underground's Disciples of Death...if they hadn't started feuding with an increasingly similar group of baby faces.
• In yet another instance of WWE being inspired by another promotion, their "Interim Cruiserweight Title Tournament" ^note  Since the reigning champion, Jordan Devlin, can't leave the UK to defend his belt due to the coronavirus pandemic, WWE decided to hold a tournament to crown an interim champ so the belt can be defended, rather than just strip Devlin of the belt. is, rather than the traditional single-elimination tournament, more like NJPW's G1 Climax, featuring two "Groups" competing against a number of set opponents, and the winners of each group determined by the one with the most victories. AEW has also used interim champs rather than strip injured champions of their titles. This concept actually comes from UFC, which has had to use it for injuries and contract disputes.
• WWE every now and then tries to replicate the success of Rey Mysterio. What made him stood out was being the small, aerial and acrobatic performer in a land that loves giantic bodybuilders. He was not only popular with kids, but also the smarks. The most obvious was Sin Cara, which failed due to him being incompetent and uncooperative. Then, the Lucha Dragons tag team of a more competent person playing Sin Cara and Kalisto. Another was Adrian Neville who seemed to have the most promise because he's not only a high-flyer, he isn't as small as the others and can do power moves. Unfortunately, they weren't given the same care and attention on the main roster that they got in NXT.
  • Likewise, the same could be said for Lita. WWE trained their Divas to use her famous lucha libre style, to the point it almost became the "standard" Diva wrestling style.
• Following the success of Mick Foley's 1999 autobiography, Have a Nice Day! A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks, every wrestler at the time began writing autobiographies of their own to varying degrees of success, including Dwayne Johnson's The Rock Says..., Chyna's If They Only Knew, Kurt Angle's It's True! It's True!, "Stone Cold" Steve Austin's The Stone Cold Truth, and Edge's Adam Copeland on Edge, among others.

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